Clearing-house mechanism

Resources for developers

The Secretariat is using the Open Data Protocol (OData) as a standard to automatically retrieve and provide access to information data sets. It is a mean to automatically aggregates information from various partners organizations into a single web application without disrupting existing information systems and knowledge management processes.

OData is a REST- based standard, approved by the OASIS consortium, that simplify the querying and sharing of data across applications for re-use in organizations, cloud, and mobile devices. With OData, information can be accessed from a variety of sources including relational databases, file systems, content management systems, and traditional web sites. It provides a way to break down data silos and increase the shared value of data by creating an ecosystem in which data consumers can interoperate with data producers in powerful ways, enabling more applications to make sense of a broader set of data. Every producer and consumer of data that participates in this ecosystem can increase its overall value.

OData is suited for querying and updating distributed data sets. It applies and builds upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and data stores.

As such, OData is also the standard used by InforMEA members to share information from their own systems and have it aggregated on the InforMEA portal.

The Secretariat has prepared, in consultation and with the support of a group of experts nominated by their governments a guidance document for parties and other stakeholders to define common standards and to facilitate the implementation of the joint clearing-house mechanism at the national and regional levels which outlines how the OData protocol is used by the Secretariat and its partners.

For a more in-depth description and technical analysis of the OData protocol visit www.odata.org.

Feed's endpoints and application programming interface (API)

The following endpoints can be used to retrieve information from the joint clearing-house mechanism. Please contact the Secretariat to let us know about the expected usage of the information.

Official contacts points of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions: feed, schema.